This Just in from the N.S. Sherlock Institute for the Bleeding Obvious: Media Likes Covering Apple
Apple makes headlines.
That’s the conclusion of a yearlong study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that Cupertino generates a disproportionately large amount of news coverage compared with other tech companies–even titans like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT).
Of the 437 tech stories Pew analyzed, 15.1 percent were primarily about Apple (AAPL)–more than Google (11 percent), Twitter (7 percent), Facebook (5 percent) and Microsoft (3 percent; “Microsoft has, at least for now, fallen off the mainstream media’s radar,” says Pew).
Which, if you follow tech news at all, is hardly a surprise. As former Apple CEO Gil Amelio explaind in his 1998 memoir, “On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple,” people obviously like reading about the company:
I could well understand an extensive interest about Apple in the Bay Area and the trade press covering high tech. But why this excessive level of coverage in other locations? So, I posed the question to a New York Times staffer: “You’re a New York newspaper and we’re a California company, why do you include so much coverage of Apple?”
“Because we sell more papers.”
I asked him to be more specific.
He said, “I can give you the exact statistics. When we run a strong story on Apple, we sell three percent more papers. So, we run stories on Apple. That’s the bottom line.”